SCOOP  We have been fortunate to be chosen by Mr G Henderson as the vehicle to disseminate his view of Australian Literature. 

G Henderson comment. The first 233 days

Hello there, it’s about time I was called to account.

Things are going very well I can tell you.  If you hadn’t heard I’m now in charge of the literature awards, that’s me and the P.M.  You’re probably thinking, ‘Tony, a Rhodes scholar, knows a thing or two about literature’!  Well I’ll disabuse you on that one.  He knows bugger all about literature.  But he does know about certainty, you see certainty is what makes a bloody good writer!  Good for sales also.  You cannot deny the cash register as the gate keeper.  That’s what Labor lost sight of, the cash register.  Tony doesn’t like writers much at all, and being a thinking persons gatekeeper I’m inclined to agree.  You see a literate PM is what the public can’t stand, gives them the ‘Gareth Evans’.  We like PM’s who are decisive and get on with the job of government.

You see writers, are a clique.  Being lefties they all hang around together.  Remember I told you about readers and writers festivals?  They’re all the same, the Age readership, Fairfax, and Michael Leunig.  They’re are all talking ‘like with like” whereas in my paper, the Australian and my friends at the IPA  don’t always agree.  We’re a broad church, and though some of us think the death penalty is alright, others are just in favour of castration and flogging.  You see we on the right represent a pluralist society.  And as for the role of women?  As on most things, we agree sensibly, that they should remain at home.  Punishment, the certainty of death, and the fact that some people need a little bit of persecution.  It’s all gods will!!

Now you’re probably wondering what sort of a grasp I’ve got on Australian literature, am I getting too deep here?  For a start I don’t like anything controversial.  Glad to say we’ve eliminated busy body academics ever since Donald Horne started to bang on about the ‘Lucky Country’.  Give us a break what a ‘Country’ he turned out to be!  Happily nowadays no academic is game to make a contribution to the public conversation and that’s a bloody good thing.  We want bang for our buck, not effete thinkers and daydreamers!

Same for all those novelists who bang on about “our society’, and ‘where we’re heading’, can’t stand them, and besides with the new ‘Freedom Commissioner’, they can go peddle their wares to Tim.  He’ll set them straight.

No I’ve got time for the important things and I’m thinking what we need more of is literature that celebrates a sense of ourselves.  We need to identify not what makes us different but what makes us identifiable as a ‘community’.  That’s why I’m commissioning several dozen excellent books on Gallipolli and Australians at war.  They’re written in a straight language about people we can really admire, and it demonstrates how we’ve grown as a nation.  There’ll be none of that carping about injustice, poverty and the ‘Secret Australia’.  This is as real as it gets, and to my thinking puts us at the forefront as a progressive society.  No time for all that claptrap about language and the migrant experience.  I’ve got little patience for aboriginal writers and the so called ‘cultural wars’.  This is the culture we have, it’s got us this far and I can’t think of a better one.  Celebrate literature, celebrate inclusiveness.  Difference and ‘other voices’ are confused background noise.  It’s what happens when you stray from the central theme of Gallipoli, sacrifice, the monarchy and god literature.  (Sorry a typo, but we must reinstate GOD)

Have you read a good book trecently?  Well I have.  There’s a new one by Senator Bernardii.  Alright, you’ve got me there!  Seems there aren’t so many right wing writers, but that’s because the left have a monopoly, it needs to be corrected, and as for language it’s like history, if it’s not standardised people will go off on tangents.  It could lead anywhere, and the returns are impossible to assess.  That’s why the PM has entrusted me with this task, and I’m very happy to say that when we remove funding from those lefty writers festivals we’ll have the sort of writers I agree with.  The Australian is a good example, balanced and not afraid to call the shots.  There has to be more of this, for without balance, we’re lost.  Bit like the aborigines, they had forty thousand years, hundreds of non standardised languages to mine, deforest and degrade this country, and what did they do with it?..Bugger All.  I rest my case.

And finally I plan the next literary award to be give posthumously to Bryce Courtenay.  Did more for Australian literature than anyone, and he wasn’t even a ‘Real Australian’.

Cheers

Our poem today comes from nunga poet Ali Cobby Eckermann

Shrine
for Valerie Martin

Among the rubble
I prop a roof
from battered rusty tin
sunlight sparkles through

old nail holes
as will stars
and droplets
of refreshing rain

I weight every stone
in my gaze
in my hands
I sweep

earthen floor
remove impurities
from its skin as
it has done mine.

I gaze at
clouded glass
no longer.

From “little bit long time“.  Picaro Press 2009

First dispatched 1 June  2014

доброе утро товарищи dobroye utro tovarishchi

From my dad’s anecdotes:

In Buenos Aires, dad befriended a Pilipino musician called Al Acosta. Al Acosta y su conjunto Hawaiiano had a weekly show on the radio. It was La hora de PalmoliveThe Palmolive Hour. Al Acosta and his band had even visited our home, and listening to his show was a must in the Baarda household. Those days most radio shows were live.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxHPGuBhnrg  No te vayas, no te vayas de Zamboanga (an Al Acosta regular)

One evening dad returned from the city and asked if we’d listened to Al Acosta that day. Of course we had. Had we noticed anything unusual? No, the show was as good as ever. Well it so happened that dad had gone to the studio, as he often did, and the lead singer was late, so dad jumped in and sang the first two songs, as if he’d been singing with the band all his life. No one listening (including his own family) was any the wiser. The songs were in English (‘Moon over Miami’ was one of them).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAiegL3J5KE  Dad hadn’t yet learned English, he would have sung them in English gobbledygook

At parties dad would sometimes sing very convincing ‘Russian’ songs. Russian gobbledygook.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3scgW-aghr4

One of the most memorable scenes in the film ‘A Fish called Wanda” is when Archie (John Cleese) does a ‘strip tease’ whilst waxing lyrical in Russian  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSK3BpSfULo This clip was “cut off” at a most crucial point, when Archie exclaims “That’s alright then!”

We were in Spain just over a decade after Francisco Franco had died. Spaniards had barely stopped looking over their shoulders. We couldn’t find many people that had a kind word for their former leader. “Cuando estaba Franco no habia ladrones” (During Franco’s rule, there were no thieves)  proclaimed one of the people I engaged in conversation. That’s alright then!

Many years later in conversation with a Chilean expatriate I was told that “Gracias a Pinochet, Chile no se hizo comunista” (Thanks to Pinochet Chile did not become communist). That’s alright then!

After the end of the Vietnam war, Australia, a signatory to the UN ‘Convention relating to the Status of Refugees’ (and a participant in that war), welcomed a large number of Vietnamese refugees to this land; many of whom came by boat.

Current Australian bipartisan policies applied to so called ‘boat people’ are less than welcoming. Bizarre non-sequiturs are pronounced (“We must disrupt the business plan of the people smugglers”) to justify the indefinite detention of human beings. The current Australian federal government fought the last election using the three word slogan “Stop the Boats”.

It is one of the few election promises they’ve kept. With great pride they boast about having stopped the boats. That’s alright then!

Iraq was alleged to posses weapons of mass destruction (WMD). An Intervention was planned. In March 2003 Iraq was invaded. The WMD failed to materialize. Saddam Hussein was deposed. That’s alright then!

In 2005 it was revealed that the Australian Wheat Board (AWB) had channeled millions of dollars to the Saddam Hussein regime in what became known as the ‘AWB oil-for-wheat scandal’. The then responsible Minister (one of my all time favorite Australian Ministers!) Alexander Downer denied all knowledge of the baksheesh رشوهThat’s alright then!

In 2007 Mal Brough (another of my all time favorite Australian Ministers!) alleged that there were paedophile rings operating on remote Aboriginal communities. An Intervention was planned. In June 2007 the Northern Territory Emergency Response (The NTER) was launched. The paedophile rings failed to materialize. A propaganda blitz convinced the Australian voter belt that “something had to be done”. Something was done. That’s alright then!

The ABTA (Aboriginal Benefits Trust Account) was set up as a conduit for Royalty Equivalents derived from mineral exploitation on Aboriginal Land, as defined under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976,  to be allocated for the benefit of NT Aborigines. Quietly since, the ‘Trust’ has been dropped, and it is now the Aboriginal Benefits Account.

Trust in me baby … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SesWRweA4fM

The Intervention included the declaration of 73 ‘Prescribed Areas’. These areas had 5-year compulsorily acquired leases slapped on them. The NTER legislation made provision for ‘fair compensation’ to be paid to the Traditional Owners for these 5-year leases. When it came time to pay, Jenny Macklin (yet another of my all time favorite Australian Ministers!)’s Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) started paying this compensation from ABA funds. When objections to this sleight of hand were raised, Jenny Macklin declared that the ABA was for the benefit of Aborigines and that compensation payments benefited Aborigines. That’s alright then!

In the film Utopia, John Pilger asks the former Minister for Indigenous Health, Warren Snowdon (would it surprise you if I told you he is another of my all time favorite Australian Ministers?), why in the 23 years he represented the Northern Territory in the Federal Parliament, so little progress had been made in improving the health of his constituents. We are doing a lot at present, the next generation of Aborigines will be much healthier, he replied. That’s alright then!

…. Cause every little thing gonna be alright!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGYAAsHT4QE

Каждая мелочь будет все в порядке!
До свидания сейчас
Фрэнк

Kazhdaya meloch’ budet vse v poryadke!
Do svidaniya seychas
Frenk

In a first for Passive Complicity we link to the documentary
The God Who Wasn’t There – documentary
http://youtu.be/ik7GRQ9hoVY

Here Richard Dawkins talks to spooky nutters of the godly persuasion!

An hour of total wonder.

My mother was distressed at the falling standards of colonial society in the heady days after WWII.  I do not remember our home without an inside lavatory (with a high cistern and a chain with a handle to pull to activate the flush).  Mother was determined that it should never be known as the Toilet – so dreadfully common.   As for defecating that was to be known as ‘having a grunt’, and for us boys we ‘tinkled’ through our ‘tassel’.  It was not polite to ask what our sisters tinkled through.

Euphemisms
“Drop the kids at school”
“Bomb the Japs”
“Off for a chocolate frog”
“Give birth to a rouse”  (said by shearers)
“Take a dump”
“Bowelling the Bowl”
“Bumming Run”
“Fecal Decal”
“Ordure of the Day”
“Dunging the Doulton”
“Turd Finalist”
“Stool’s Out!”

The Editor has rejected a number of euphemisms as being “Offensive”, as were a number of suggestions regarding blocking of pipes.  We do have standards and sometimes they are to be maintained.
This comment is from Quantum Dumpster (not a bad euphemism in itself)

I sympathise with the Shaw antecedents. However I am sure (sic) that “Pedistal” is actually “Pedestal”
I think this may refer to the china bowl.  But I thought of a Pedestal basin, and I hope people would have known that the basin was actually intended for washing ones hands following a motion.
It hearkens me to another euphemism – ” I must go and move a motion” said the politician.

All very good solid content I have no doubt, however Ira Maine added this gem to our collection

The O’Flaherty.

The following is a letter sent in response to a request from a manager to the resident owner of a western district (Victoria) grazing property for an inside lavatory at his manager’s residence.  Written in the early 1950’s. Ed.  Tomorrow we look further into this subject matter.

Dear ….

I refer to your suggestion re shifting W.C. convenience to Bath Room

I am not in favour of this move – it is against the Shaw tradition and ideas.  You have only to look at my home and Kiama where my brother says he would not live in a house with W.C. inside etc, and same applies to our Melbourne homes.  Margaret and (Wyn) were strictly forbidden to use inside W.C. when we were staying at Mt Lawley except in an emergency and the night time.

I’ll tell you of some of my experiences with my 3 septic tanks – I inspect them almost daily and if I miss I regret it invariably.  I fish out quite a big section of the ‘Argus’ with a toasting fork etc a very nasty job.  Then I flush our pedistal with a cream can (bucket) and I am relieved when it goes tis all clear.

The people who use their septic tank lifted the concrete lid of their tank and found 3 dead sheepdog puppies big oversize the tank.  I found this a nasty job recovering the bodies and removing them

I remove everything from the pedistal when shearing is on because they have blocked up the pipes.  I intended putting in a septic tank at the shearers hut but I have been warned on no account to do so.

I have come to the conclusion that a man is a fool to put in a Septic Tank for the Australian working man.  – Of course this does not apply to you and Jean, but it possibly applies to the ones that come after you and occupy your present house and, as you reminded me one has to look ahead.

I tremble to think of the condition of affairs in your house if the house was occupied by others than you and Jean, people who I would willingly employ and people that I have employed.

They have fowled the pipes stuffing them up.  I got Dickerson (plumber) to get them going.  Apart from this a W.C. in the house would be a tragedy.  We have to look ahead.

Signed (A great uncle of mine)

This is confidential and should be burned.  GS

by Tarquin O’Flaherty

John Swinton, born in Scotland in 1829, emigrated to the US with his parents in the 1830’s.  Within a few years Swinton’s father had died and the young man became the breadwinner.    Thus began a peripatetic existence which began as an apprentice printer in Illinois at the age of thirteen, then he moved to Canada as a journeyman printer until about 1850.  He spent the next five years in Massachusetts, from thence to New York City and from there to Kansas where he became manager of ‘The Lawrence Republican’, an anti slavery newspaper.  He then moved to the slave state of South Carolina where he secretly taught literacy to black people!  By 1860 Swinton was back in New York where, on the strength of work submitted, was offered a post as an editorial writer with  the New York Times.  Eventually he became the Times chief editorial writer.

Having worked with various New York newspapers, the Times, the Sun and the Tribune, John Swinton founded his own paper in 1883 which he called simply ‘The John Swinton Paper.’  The masthead of his paper pledged amongst other things to uphold the rights of workers and their unions during a time when scab labour and strike breaking by police was an everyday occurrence.

The paper also pledged to warn the American people ‘against the treasonable and crushing schemes of millionaires, monopolists and plutocrats.’  People like Wiliam H. Vanderbilt and Jay Gould were prime targets for Swinton, whom he described as ‘robber barons’.

Refusing all offers of financial assistance during its four years or so of existence, Swinton instead ploughed his own money back into his paper.  Swinton’s absolute insistence on total editorial independence and his refusal to accept financial support from any quarter, made him dependent entirely on newspaper sales.

Despite huge support from workers who regularly bought his paper, he simply didn’t sell enough papers to make the whole enterprise viable.  In 1887 he was forced through debt to close his paper down. and go back to work at the New York Sun.

Swinton gathered vast crowds when he spoke at public meetings in support of exploited workers.  He was a hugely eloquent and passionate speaker and police were called in many times to break up the crowds who came to hear him. His eloquence eventually resulted in his running (unsuccessfully) as a candidate for mayor of New York.

Swinton, died and is buried in Brooklyn, New York where a monument to his memory was erected by union members.

Here is an extract from ‘Labor’s Untold Story’ by Boyer and Morais, concerning a dinner given in Swinton’s honour in 1880 by his fellow journalists and ‘leaders of his craft’, at which someone was rash enough to stand and offer a toast ‘to our independent press’.

‘Swinton outraged his colleagues by replying:

“There is no such thing, at this date in the world’s history, in America, as an independent press.  You know it and I know it.

There’s not one of you who dares to write your honest opinion, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinion to appear in just one issue of my paper, before twenty four hours my occupation would be gone.

The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press?.

We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.’

END OF QUOTE.

What an amazing character this man was and how right he was about the realities of the journalistic profession.  Today precisely the same carpet baggers and swindlers, the same insatiable greed is everywhere and exploitation is rampant.

However, despite this, we do nowadays have campaigning journalists, newspapers and the public broadcasting services who fight valiantly against ridiculous odds to expose some of the worst excesses of the system. That these honourable people occasionally succeed in sending some of these swindlers to jail deserves our unstinting admiration.
That these campaigners exist at all, or are allowed to exist and continue campaigning, gives me hope that  all the things that John Swinton held dear, like honesty, self-respect and the care of the down trodden have not been entirely lost to the world.

Tarquin O’Flaherty

Science going back to dark ages writes  Ian Berryman*. |
(First published Fairfax May 28, 2014)

The Climate Commission has gone. The carbon tax is to be rescinded. The Australian Renewable Energy Agency is to be abolished. The promise of a “Million Solar Roofs” is broken. And in what can only be described as an ideological move, the Abbott government introduced bills to abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, despite it making a profit last year. The Prime Minister has declared war on the Australian renewable energy industry, the environment and science itself.

The overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming is based on evidence, whether Tony Abbott chooses to act on it or not. A sceptic is someone who doubts accepted opinion; a denier is someone who refuses to accept fact. Scepticism is healthy, denial is dangerous, and intentionally dismantling the entire renewable energy industry of a country that is not only wealthy, sun blessed and windswept but also has the highest per capita CO2 emissions in the OECD is criminally reckless. Furthermore, it will cripple our future economic growth.

The global economy has embraced the renewable energy industry. Last year wind power grew by 25 per cent worldwide and solar power by 30 per cent. On May 11, Germany met 74 per cent of its electricity demand with renewable energy.

Germany, the strongest and largest economy in Europe, has only half the average solar resource of Australia yet has 10 times the capacity of solar PV panels. The Chinese economy is four times the size of ours yet they have 30 times as much wind power installed.

While we quibble about the intermittency of renewables, industries in Spain and the US have invested billions in solar thermal plants, many of which store heat and produce electricity long after sunset. Given our abundant renewable resources, we should be leading the world in research and investment, instead Abbott would have us squander our competitive advantage and destroy massive economic potential.

This budget has been decried as heartless; unfortunately, it is also brainless. The sun provides the Earth with enough energy in one hour to power civilisation for a year. There are already 19 markets worldwide where solar PV panels match or undercut fossil fuel electricity prices, without subsidy. The sun’s rays will soon dominate and underpin the entire global economy. This government’s denial of both sun and science can only be described as pre-Copernican.

The attacks on renewable energy have been performed without mandate, justified by falsehoods and are economically counterproductive. While Treasurer Joe Hockey finds wind turbines “disgusting”, the ideological overtones of the budget suggest a darker, Randian philosophy behind this offensive. I have invested my career in solar power; I am trying to build the motor that drives the world. However, Abbott is shutting that motor down. While he may talk of direct action, his only actions to date have been to direct renewable energy investment and industry overseas.

Unfortunately, it will not just be investment and industry that are driven away but people, too. I am an Australian Student Prize Winner, a first-class honours graduate of Melbourne University and a Dean’s Honours Recipient from its engineering department. I study solar power at Oxford University and despite the incredible potential of my industry I have no future in Abbott’s Australia. Instead I will be welcomed home to a non-existent industry, no unemployment benefits and an ever-increasing HECS debt. I don’t want the only carbon emissions I save Australia to be the flight I never take home. We should be exporting solar power technology, not solar power jobs.

Elsewhere, R&D is recognised as the path to future economic prosperity and not a burden on the present. The value added to British GDP by research is conservatively estimated at £30 billion ($55 billion), from a total research budget of £3.5 billion. This is why, when Britain faced a far greater debt to GDP ratio, several banking collapses and a GFC-induced recession, the level of nominal research funding was kept constant.

Cuts to ARENA, ANSTO, the CSIRO, and many other research bodies will severely damage our long-term economic health.

Perhaps then we will have a real deficit crisis. Furthermore, the multidisciplinary nature of research means that the Medical Research Fund will be ineffective without adequate support from physics, engineering, chemistry and many other scientific areas Abbott is currently de-funding at research, doctorate and undergraduate level.

Worryingly, the long payback periods of research mean that this reckless economic damage will be hard to recover from; coaxing once-betrayed investment, business confidence and research expertise back to Australia will be difficult if not impossible.

That this onslaught against renewable energy, the environment, research and science comes from a government with no science minister  is unfortunately and even predictably unsurprising. The late Carl Sagan commented, “We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

The fuse to this mix was lit on budget night, it remains to be seen whether the Australian public will allow it to blow up.

*  Ian Berryman is reading for a DPhil in engineering science at the University of Oxford.  His thesis is on solar thermal power. He is also president of the (student run) Oxford Energy Society. 

With comments from Ira Maine, Poetry Editor

THE ROSE OF THE WORLD

by: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

WHO dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?

For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,

Mournful that no new wonder may betide,

Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,

And Usna’s children died.

 

We and the labouring world are passing by:

Amid men’s souls, that waver and give place

Like the pale waters in their wintry race,

Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,

Lives on this lonely face.

 

Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:

Before you were, or any hearts to beat,

Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;

He made the world to be a grassy road

Before her wandering feet.

Rather than take this poem line by line, I believe it sufficient to say that the poem is a refutation of the notion ‘…that beauty passes like a dream…’